The Lives of a Poet

Towards the end of Samuel Johnson's Life of Savage, when Savage 'had been six months in prison', we are told of his death:

The last Time that the Keeper saw him was on July the 31st, 1743; when Savage, seeing him at his Bed-side, said, with an uncommon Earnestness, I have something to say to you, Sir, but, after a Pause, moved his Hand in a melancholy Manner, and finding himself unable to recollect what he was going to communicate, said 'Tis gone. The Keeper soon after left him, and the next Morning he died. He was buried in the Church-yard of St. Peter, at the Expense of the Keeper.¹

Johnson presents Savage's last words as lost words. His subject is shown finding himself unable to find his words, and the measure of the writing ('but, after a Pause, moved his Hand', 'and finding himself'), writes a gap into its narrative sequence which points to something immeasurable. Inside the flicker of time it takes to tell of a pause is the imaginative possibility of another kind of story, a perspective that seems, briefly, intimate with the moment in Savage's consciousness when he had something to say and the time it might have taken to say it, and, simultaneously, distant from the vista or chasm of these lost words. What is presented, for the witness, as 'a Pause', might, for Savage, have had a temporal dimension not plausibly summarised by this word. For him, the inside of this moment may have been fleetingly crowded or eerily vacant; such temporal vertigo might be shown by a novelist, as, say, a whole life flashing before consciousness, or as a prolonged depiction of the mental anguish of having something on the tip of your tongue.

Both novels and biographies can describe narrative asymmetries, but novels dramatise the spaces between the sequence of what they tell and the sequence of their own telling. Temporal asymmetries in biographical writing carry implications for the omniscience perceived in the author over the historical person that is his or her subject: where a novelist might show us both Savage's loss for words and give us the apparently privileged knowledge of that content which he can no longer find, a biographer who offered such information might seem to be confusing an assumed knowledge about a subject's consciousness with the proper consciousness for a subject in possession of knowledge. In this matter of creative omniscience, Johnson's writing shows restraint. He records a blank, and does not speculate as to what Savage's words might have been. Not that Johnson doesn't stylise the moment. He makes an old story novel. 'An uncommon Earnestness' and 'a melancholy Manner' exist somewhere between the keeper's apparent account and the author's fashioning, becoming a portrait of loss which, while not averting its gaze from the practical detail of the cost of the burial, also invigorates the ordinary words ''Tis gone' with renewed illocutionary force, paradoxically returning a strength of utterance to Savage just as he says he's lost his words, so that he also seems to half-speak of his own passing. Gently sorrowful, faintly comic, the 'pause' shares with Samuel Beckett a scripted listening in to dying words as they turn into words that went dead.

Just as Johnson has described the death of his subject, 'Such were the Life and Death of Richard Savage, a man equally distinguished by his Virtues and Vices', Savage is suddenly brought back to life again, in the particular, as the next paragraph describes his face, his voice, 'a long Visage, coarse Features, and melancholy Aspect'; 'His Walk...